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Comment by digianarchist | Hacker News Reader

Zoom. Sick of this app hijacking the audio channel of my Bose headphones when I'm not in a call.

As much as they try to hide the fact, it is actually possible to join a Zoom meeting in your browser. That way you don't have to install a sketchy app with root privileges and directory traversal bugs.

I initially tried this when my language learning course had to go remote and the teacher insisted on using Zoom. But I ran into a dealbreaker issue with the web view: It does not have the grid view of all participants' cameras, and (to my knowledge) it also does not allow selecting the camera of a single person manually. This is an issue when I need to see a flash card that the teacher is holding up, but someone else is speaking, so the camera switches to them.

I'm currently working without this by using a device issued by my employer, where the Zoom app is pre-installed by the IT dept. and therefore using it for the language class does not make things worse.

Confusingly, there are 2 different versions of the Zoom web app:

1. The "Join from Your Browser" links take you to the worse version, which I assume is legacy or something.

2. There is also a progressive web app version [1] that has more feature parity to the desktop app. It has the grid view built-in, but for whatever reason it doesn't seem to show as many people at a time vs the desktop app grid view.

[1]: https://pwa.zoom.us/wc

Try other browsers; grid view still works in some of them (Chrome IIRC).

It definitely lets you pin a single feed, not sure about the grid view though.

I also do this on macOS with Chrome, but I found that if I join mega Zoom call (say hundreds of people) then the video will suddenly freeze after some random amount of time. That makes it unreliable and especially nervous when giving a presentation this way.

This is what I do. It's only a couple clicks deep and works as well as the native app. Definitely preferable to having that junk on my machine.

Don't get me started on zoom...

How about making an app that actually work on Linux ? That doesn't take 200% CPU when you're in a meeting.

The same on windows, it's such a badly optimized application with memory leak all over the place...

I hate it with all my guts.

It's not better on macOS. Bugs I encounter regularly: webcam not working, memory leaks, CPU usage maxed out.

I used https://meet.jit.si/ for a language meetup.

I opened one tab for the group which had 10 people some sharing video I then opened 3 more tabs for specific languages (English, German, and Russian)

The quality was still good. It was the same as being in a crowded area a train station, but it worked.

I have had interviews with zoom and teams, these were not as good. With less people.

I'm studying guitar remotely and my teacher recorded a small bit of the call so that I can review later. He was playing and talking, I was completely quiet and not moving. Zoom decided to record my camera with his sound. He said that it was like that for all his students that day and couldn't figure out why.

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